Crypto looked useful as long as the price kept going up. Everyone likes free money.
With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet.
That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.
This paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682) also touches on a pretty fascinating phenomenon - that when scaling up large language models they seem to "naturally" obtain new emergent abilities that do not exist on smaller models.